‘Bill & Ted Face The Music’: Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter to Star in Franchise’s Third Film, Produced by Steven Soderbergh
Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves will reprise their roles as time-trekking bandmates in a third installment of the “Bill & Ted” franchise. International sales for “Bill & Ted Face the Music” are underway courtesy of Bloom at the Cannes Film Festival, which launches Tuesday night. The film, now in pre-production, reunites the leads following “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (1989) and “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” (1991).
“We couldn’t be more excited to get the whole band back together again,” said Winter and Reeves in a statement. All three entries in the trilogy came from screenwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Soloman, and the stars describe this long-awaited script as “amazing.” “Galaxy Quest” and “Red 2” director Dean Parisot — winner of a 1988 Live Action Short Film Oscar for “The Appointments of Dennis Jennings” — will oversee production, rounding out the Winter- and Reeves-dubbed “dream team.” Fellow Academy Award recipient Steven Soderbergh is set to executive produce, along with Scott Fischer (“The November Man”), John Ryan Jr., and John Santilli.
The actors were in their early 20s when they first played Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan. “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” saw a phone booth time machine introduce the history students to everyone from Napoleon to Billy the Kid. In “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” their guitar duo, Wyld Stallyns, spawned a utopian society, and critics like Chuck De Nomolos (Joss Ackland) visited the past to stop them from winning the coveted Battle of the Bands.
Round three opens on Bill and Ted as middle-aged family men who’ve written thousands of bad songs. But now they must write a good one — says a guest from the future — or else jeopardize all of mankind. Thus they head back in the phone booth, this time accompanied by their daughters.
Now a documentarian, Winter had Reeves narrate his 2015 bitcoin film “Deep Web.” According to Entertainment Weekly, this “Bill & Ted” tale has been in the works since at least 2007. “We wanted to have it be something that we — all four of us, Chris and I, Alex and Keanu — could stand behind, and know we’re doing this for the right reasons,” Soloman told the magazine in March.
MGM will release “Bill & Ted Face the Music” stateside under its Orion Pictures subsidiary.
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